by Zaza, Agatha
THE PRETENDERS
AGATHA ZAZA
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Agatha Zaza is a Zambian and Finn at present living in Auckland, New Zealand. Her writing is a departure from her work in fundraising and international development.
The Pretenders was born in Singapore, where she spent three years as a trailing spouse, where she rekindled a long-dormant love of writing. Aside from Singapore, Agatha has worked and lived in several countries, among them Uganda and the then Soviet Union. While in Ireland, she earned a Master’s in Equality Studies from University College Dublin and worked in a genuine Irish pub.
Agatha’s work can be seen in the Johannesburg Review of Books and in a PEN International special edition on African writers. She has also published three short books on Amazon. She’s been a passionate slow runner for two and half decades and has recently taken up composting and staring at her new sewing machine.
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Agora Books
Agora Books is a division of Peters Fraser + Dunlop Ltd
55 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1BS
Copyright © Agatha Zaza, 2020
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
For Jo
1
The bespoke play den had not been made to blend into the garden setting. It had been built to mimic childhood spontaneity, cleverly lopsided and made of cedar planks, seven feet high and nearly as wide, and painted a grey-blue. It had been designed to be noticed, to appeal to children to come to play in it. Its flat timber roof had been built to hold escaped pirates and rampaging sea monsters. A short flagpole was fixed upon it, made to be captured. Its little door and single window had been framed in white, and two round stumps of wood stood in front of it, serving no real purpose except to be jumped off.
A borrowed sledgehammer smashed into thin wood walls. Edmund butchered the little unoccupied — never occupied — playhouse in a salvo of blows that reverberated throughout the garden and over its walls. A rush of anger freed itself from his lungs through each grunt that came with every blow.
After the assault, he stopped to examine what he’d done. The tiny house held together for a moment, its sides cleaved from one another. Not built to withstand someone desperate to erase it from existence, what was left of the little house swayed and collapsed.
Seeing it fallen, Edmund found himself dissatisfied and continued, splintering the playhouse into the smallest pieces he could. His body was built for this kind of work but unaccustomed to it. His tall, long figure rapidly began to feel the pain. He ignored the beads of sweat that rose in his curly brown hair and stubble. He closed his eyes as his hands gripped the unfamiliar instrument, his skin bruising and manicure quickly damaged. Clods of dirt and debris flew against his pyjamas, and his slippers were ruined.
The sky was not quite dark, but it wasn’t yet morning. It was the time of day after the end of parties and the closing of clubs yet before the legions of dogwalkers and early runners took to the pavements and parks. Edmund worked by the dim glow of the streetlamp that stood just outside his garden wall. He battered the playhouse, oblivious to the world around him.
His garden was pristine. The smell of recently mowed grass lingered in the air. Set on a terraced street, the back garden met a park whose trees, verdant with seasonal foliage, spread their limbs over the garden’s extreme end where Edmund was splintering now formless planks. He was obscured by shadows cast by its high stone walls embedded with creepers. As he fought, the ground beneath him turned to mud.
Edmund gritted his teeth as he struck the child-sized flag over and over, embedding it in the damp grass.
‘Shit!’ He winced as he missed and instead struck the concrete border of a flower bed that circled the inside of the wall. The sledgehammer ricocheted, and Edmund slipped with the force, putting out his hand to steady himself, swearing again as he cut his hand on the fallen walls.
The lawn ended in a pale stone terrace, a platform of bland undistinguished beige masonry. Behind him, four floors of grey-brown brick towered in a silhouette against the city lights in the distance. Edmund felt as if its windows were glaring down at him, as if the house were alive and urging him on, telling him to finish what he’d begun.
He knew the playhouse didn’t have to be demolished. It could have been disassembled, sold — passed on to someone with little children who’d play endless games of pirates and cowboys in it. But his rage had needed an outlet, and the playhouse had been here, mocking him day after day, a constant reminder of what he’d lost and would never have again.
Edmund returned to his house on unsteady legs. A swell of relief welled within him as he glanced back at what remained of the playhouse.
He felt closer to the end, able to see the finish line, and he could just about bear looking at his own home. Ahead of him stood a twelve-foot-tall clear glass cube. Attached to the back of the house, a glass extension was framed in black iron, punctuating the garden’s Victorian heritage like a slap. With its glass ceiling and walls, the cube stood futuristic in its contrast with the hundred-and-twenty-year-old house. A low light inside it glowed, showing off its contemporary garden furniture. An armchair and two sofas in grey, standing on hexagonal tiling in black and white that hid underfloor heating. A table spoke of drinks and early breakfasts, afternoon barbecues and promises of autumn evenings spent with soft music and books.
Its apparent perfection riled him, and Edmund imagined taking a hammer to the glass extension, knowing he couldn’t. He wanted desperately to leave this house, sell it — or, preferably, strike it out of existence, erase all traces of the life he’d led here. He wanted to leapfrog past the agents, the potential buyers, the questions and forms to be filled and to escape — to where, he didn’t know.
Edmund opened the cube’s door noiselessly, and a wall of warm air met him as he stepped inside.
‘Finished?’ Ovidia asked Edmund as he entered the extension, the sledgehammer abandoned in the garden. She stood lacing a clean pair of running shoes. It was early, even for her. Her eyes were swollen from recent tears and a night spent between crying and tossing and turning in bed. Her worn blue tee-shirt and shorts had been washed repeatedly until their colours faded and seams frayed. Her hair was bound in a cheap headscarf and her feet in a pair of lurid purple slippers.
Edmund grunted in response, looking at his ruined nightclothes in the light. He examined his hands and saw that one was bleeding — a cut that immediately began to sting. He rubbed his hands on his shirt leaving red-brown streaks of blood.
‘We could’ve sold it,’ Ovidia said, missing an eyelet. ‘We agreed, remember?’
‘A month ago,’ Edmund replied. ‘We’ve been endlessly putting it off, like everything else.’
‘We could have waited a little bit longer,’ she insisted louder and tossed the shoe onto the floor, her task abandoned incomplete.
‘What for, a few hundred pounds?’ he asked in a quiet, weary voice.
Ovidia picked her shoe up from where it had landed and, sitting down on the closest chair, began to cry. Again. She leaned over, covering her face with her hands and an unlaced shoe. Edmund felt as if it was for the thousandth time that week. He could never have imagined that one day he would run out of empathy, that he’d be unable to reach out to her and comfort her. He was exhausted by her helplessness, her paraly
sis, her inability to function.
It would soon be over. Edmund steadied himself with the idea that today would close this chapter of his life. He’d finally be able to escape the house and everything in it, even Ovidia.
‘Are you going running? Today?’ he asked, realising afterwards that it sounded like an accusation.
Ovidia clutched the shoe, her eyes pressed tightly shut.
‘It won’t change anything if you don’t,’ he said, and she loosened her grip on the shoe.
Guilt gnawing at him, Edmund watched her cry and finally moved to sit beside her, wrapping her in his arms. He contemplated the contrast between her skin and his skin, something he’d done only in the earliest days of their relationship. He watched the blood seep from his hand into the fabric of her shirt. His thoughts vacillated between knowing the shirt would be thrown away and contemplating how he would survive leaving her.
2
Edmund’s personal assistant had given Jasper the wrong address. He’d called her in the morning. She’d answered, her voice groggy with a hint of annoyance. Jasper had tried to compensate for calling her so early by playing up his charm, lowering his voice and dragging the syllables of her name. She’d seemed momentarily flustered, asked after his health, and then asked him to hold while she checked. ‘Wait, that’s not it,’ he’d thought he’d heard her say to herself, ‘this one,’ she’d said.
Jasper had jotted down the Hammersmith address as the PA read it out haltingly, as if it was unfamiliar. It seemed it wasn’t often she was asked for her employer’s address. Once she’d finished, Jasper thanked her and hung up.
They could have come by Underground — only a short walk away — but Jasper had said he didn’t feel like plodding here from the station. But now his hangover had subsided, chased away by more than the recommended dose of painkillers, and Jasper was content. He could imagine having another celebratory drink at his brother’s house.
‘All right?’ the driver had asked when they climbed in.
‘Yes, most definitely all right,’ Jasper had replied as he reclined in the seat.
On the phone that morning, Edmund’s PA had told Jasper that Edmund was in the city, but, she’d said, she didn’t know if he was at home or not — those weren’t the sort of details he shared with her.
He’d texted his brother the previous night about coming to visit, and, upon receiving no reply, had decided to surprise him in the morning. Had Jasper called, he was sure Edmund would have answered, letting him know if he was in a skyscraper in Kuala Lumpur or in his local Waitrose selecting a microwave dinner. The worst that would happen would be their merry little gang would have to find some other place to celebrate.
Jasper knew that he was taking a chance of barging in on him because Edmund, when in London, still spent his Saturday mornings doing nothing but reading newspapers and being happily unproductive. The last Saturday morning he’d ever spent at Edmund’s home — the large, gleaming, contemporary flat his brother had owned years ago — Edmund had made a cup of tea and parked himself in a spot by the window in which he could enjoy the sunlight streaming into the room. Edmund had played a form of folksy jazz that Jasper couldn’t stand. Edmund had hummed along, quickly and easily finishing a selection of crossword puzzles from an omnibus he’d found in the attic of their parents’ house. Later that morning, Jasper had found the omnibus abandoned on a side table, flicked through it, and found inscribed in the inside cover Ed, 12, Bristol. He’d chuckled as he scrolled through it, pausing to examine the difference over thirty years made in his brother’s handwriting, and finding it fascinating that, at the ages of twelve or forty, Edmund could still find the same pastime fascinating.
Now, Jasper and his companions were arriving in a taxi at exactly 10am, watching the ordinary Saturday morning unfold around them. The road began in a commonplace assortment of houses from various eras of London history — monolithic concrete blocks of flats of the ’60s and bland suburban semi-detached houses of the ’80s. A third of the way up the street, the left-hand side began to evolve into regal Victorian terraces, while the right remained modest brown brick, though the houses were of the same age.
His brother’s house was boldly affluent, like its neighbours. The houses along the terrace were nearly identical, and their inhabitants would call themselves palatable euphemisms for rich — such as ‘comfortable’ or ‘well off’. An agent would say this was a catchment area for a top school with excellent access to the city. The row of houses was a few dozen long, each with a stark white ground floor with a bay window beside each front door. The rest of the buildings were brown and grey brick, and each house had six windows set in white porticos and a lower ground floor visible from where it set low into the ground. Low wrought iron fences delineated each house, and small front gardens and walkways flung out surprises, such as brightly coloured tiles and plant pots.
Jasper’s little group stopped outside the address he’d been given. Edmund’s front door was beige. All six windows that faced the street were curtained. The front door was visibly ajar.
3
Edmund got up twice that Saturday morning. At some indefinite time, he’d hauled himself out of a bed in which he’d lain sleepless. After he’d rendered the playhouse into splinters, he’d watched Ovidia leave for her run and, realising there was nothing for him to do, had trudged back up the stairs. Ovidia’s alarm for five in the morning had rung in their absence. It rang at that time five or six mornings a week, nearly every week, wherever in the world they were. He’d sat on the bed shutting off the alarm’s insistent beeping and, in his soiled night clothes, had fallen into sound yet brief sleep. Then, as usual, at six — even on this morning — he got up himself.
Edmund sat for a moment on the bed he and Ovidia shared most nights. On the housekeeper’s days off, he or Ovidia would straighten the sheets and the cover and leave the collection of decorative pillows on the floor where they tossed them each night before bed. Today, it wouldn’t be made.
He let his feet rest on the short plush carpet that ended in a rectangle of tiling that bordered the fireplace — the only original feature in the room he’d let remain. He waited, hoping for the strength and motivation to rise. Eventually, he stood, telling himself he had no choice.
Edmund brushed his teeth and washed his face in a bathroom that bore no resemblance to the one he’d had completely gutted and refitted. He had a fondness for long, hot showers, and the shower with a glass enclosure had been his choice but, thinking of Ovidia, he had insisted on the curved white freestanding tub. The two of them had soaked in it together covered in bubbles one evening when it was new, and, in the two years since, it had never been used again.
He struggled down to the kitchen on the lower ground floor. The journey seemed long and arduous, and he trudged down the stairs, moving slowly. His back hurt. He knew that was from swinging the sledgehammer, but still he felt as if he suddenly and inexplicably weighed twice what he had the night before. He tripped, grabbing the bannister and wincing at the pain in his bruised palms and stiff fingers.
Once in the kitchen, Edmund put the kettle to boil and sat down on one of four barstools lined up along a large glossy kitchen peninsula. The kitchen looked almost exactly as it had the day it was completed. He’d listened to the decorator as she’d explained in lengthy, elaborate sentences how she thought they ought to be sympathetic to the house’s history. Edmund had no particular interest in old homes. He had several friends who had lovingly restored Victorian, Georgian, and even medieval homes. They’d consulted specialists and spent hours in search of period features to replace those that had been lost. They retained lopsided windows and revelled in creaking floors. To have a new build as he preferred, he’d have had to live further from Ovidia. To him, this house had been an adequate shell in which he and she would build a new life.
He’d ignored the decorator and selected a contemporary design in complete contrast to the building’s age, erasing its previous owner’s attempt at reinstat
ing its Victorian features. He had little interest in preserving its history, he’d reminded her — he liked its size and location. He didn’t tell her it was across the street from Ovidia. Following his instructions, the designer installed sleek, glossy kitchen cabinets in dark blue and had the walls painted in a brilliant white. A dining area followed the peninsula and its stools. Behind the dining table and chairs was an informal living area with nothing except a grey velvet sofa and matching armchair. This was meant to be a family area. The designer had envisioned a mounted flat-screen television and storage for toys, neither of which had been realised.
The kitchen was, the designer had insisted repeatedly, made for entertaining, but Edmund had done that infrequently. A few of his guests had complimented his taste and asked for referrals, to which he said he’d forgotten her name, which happened to be the truth.
Daylight shone in through the glass cube. The light reflected onto the wall above the black dining table, and Edmund could still make out the outlines of the three enormous framed photographs that had been mounted there for a few short months. Still their imprint seemed to linger, though he had examined the wall, checking for physical evidence of their having existed — a subtle change in paint colour perhaps — but found none.
Edmund fried an egg, harder and drier than he wanted, and slid it onto his toast. He reached for the radio standing on the sideboard, heard a strain of classical music only for a second and then turned it off, dreading the sound of any voices that would follow. He sat in silence and chewed his food, his tea untouched beside it. He sat wondering if Ovidia was on a long run, a short run, a tempo run, or the various types of run that she’d explained to him and he’d since mixed up. It was Saturday — which was supposed to mean something in her schedule. As this wasn’t a usual Saturday, he guessed she would likely be away for a long while.